


let's stop running from love

by CoralAcacia



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, Fluff, am i projecting? probably, and a lil bit of angst, just some kids talking about their feelings and making out, there's pynch if u squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-05
Updated: 2018-04-05
Packaged: 2019-04-18 14:02:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14214729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CoralAcacia/pseuds/CoralAcacia
Summary: In which relationships are sorted, the dead are remembered, and everyone is overwhelmingly happy to be alive.





	let's stop running from love

**Author's Note:**

> gotta get my kicks (aka bluesey makeouts) before maggie releases the dreamer trilogy. fic title is from troye sivan's "my my my!", an absolute bop.

In the aftermath, Blue finds that she cannot stop crying. Initially, they are tears of pain, the kind that makes you feel as though you are breaking in two. The kind that comes about when you realize you may have just killed the only person who could ever truly know every piece of you; the person who the universe had decreed to be _yours_ , and yours alone.

But then he wakes up, hazel eyes fluttering open like the wings of butterflies. And suddenly the tears are those of relief, those of exhaustion, those of _what now?_ She cradles his head to her chest, his ear to her pounding heart. After a moment, Gansey’s arms come up to wrap around her.

He says, hoarsely, “Blue.”

She presses her eyes shut.

Across from them, Ronan is still crumpled in the grass, watching the two of them. Adam has stopped his destructive pacing to stand behind him, a hand resting on his shoulder. It is then that Blue remembers that — _ah_. She is not the only person to ever love Richard Campbell Gansey III, and she would be a selfish fool to pretend otherwise.

She lets him go, and together, they all help him up.

“I’m not going to break,” Gansey says, voice touched at the edge with attempted levity. There is a space at the end of his sentence for where Ronan might usually mention something about old age, or where Blue might elbow him simply to be an aggravation.

Now, there is none of that. Instead, Ronan pulls him into a fierce hug, and then Adam does the same, and then Henry walks over and claps him on the shoulder. A sixth member of their little constellation is conspicuously absent, but none of them can quite bring themselves to mention it, and so for now, they do not.

There is some conferencing, between the newly-resurrected and the nearly-unmade and the quasi-murderer and the almost-savior and the accidental catalyst. The words are small, easily ignored, and so Blue does just that.

Eventually, she and Gansey find themselves shuffled into the backseat of the BMW. She takes his hand, and they watch through the windshield as Henry disappears back to Litchfield in his Fisker. Ronan and Adam take another moment for themselves, the latter’s hand reaching out to wipe black blood gently from beneath the former’s eyes.

Blue buries her face in Gansey’s shoulder. The moment feels too tender for her own eyes to witness.

They’re halfway back to 300 Fox Way when Gansey shuffles his phone out of his pocket and glances over the screen. He has fifteen missed calls, thirty unread texts, eight voicemails — from his parents, from his sister, from his acquaintances. Methodically, he answers them, easing into his charming persona as though he had not been dead just twenty minutes before. It is unnerving.

At 300 Fox Way, the women wrap them all in blankets and sit them down in the living room. They’re quiet for a long time, just the four of them looking at each other, unable to quite comprehend that it’s really over, that they really made it out.

Well, except for the one of them who didn’t.

As if sensing the growing realization, Maura steps into the room and turns on a single lamp. At Blue’s side, Gansey flinches against the unexpected light. “I’m sorry,” Maura says. “The ghost has passed on. For good.”

Something in Blue’s chest caves in. Her cheeks are already tacky with dried tears, but it seems she has more left. They spill out from her eyes, down her cheeks, and she lets them. Across from her, Ronan clenches his fists and curls into himself. It is only after she watches his shoulders heave erratically a few times that she realizes he must be crying again, too.

It is not fair that of all of them, he has had to lose the most. Gansey died, but he came back. Adam grew up in a bad place, but he’s managed to break himself free from it. Blue lost her mother, but they found her.

Nothing is ever going to bring Ronan’s parents back to him. Nothing will ever bring Noah back to them.

After a long while, Ronan raises his head. His eyes are rimmed in red. He says, “Fucker didn’t even stop to say goodbye, did he?”

There isn’t anything to say to that, because it’s true. Because even if Noah wanted to say goodbye, he couldn’t. The demon made sure of that, warping him all these past months, turning him into a monster in the shape of a boy. Forcing him, in the end, into a sacrifice of unbearable proportions.

Nothing seems fair, in this moment.

The night is a restless one, each of them unwilling to sleep for fear of waking up to find another of their group dead or gone. Instead, they watch television of the worst kind — late night soap operas, midnight weather updates, early morning news channels. They eat nothing, because they cannot bear it. They drink nothing, because they cannot bear it.

It has barely been twelve hours, by the time the sun comes up, and still Blue finds herself wondering how much longer it will be until they are _okay_.

Adam pulls tarot cards in the pale light of dawn, Ronan’s head resting on his knee. Blue watches them, her own fingers carding through Gansey’s hair. She wants to break the silence, but is almost afraid to. When at last she musters the courage, all she asks is, “What do they say?”

Adam looks up, and she remembers that there was a time when she did not know what to make of him, what to offer him, how to fix him. She realizes now, as the watery sunlight illuminates his eyes and turns him from a boy into something supernatural, that it was never her job to do any of those things.

In the end, he fixed himself, and found someone who could offer him so much more than she ever could have.

He says, “The cards have told me that we’re all madly in love.”

She smiles, and her heart begins to fit its shards back together. “I wouldn’t say they’re wrong,” she says, and it is soft, hardly a breath in the quiet of the room.

“I wouldn’t either,” Adam says. “Isn’t that the first rule of magic? Don’t fight fate?”

Gansey, awake and still breathing, lifts his head from Blue’s shoulder and says, in a tone that brooks no argument, “Fuck fate.”

And Ronan’s laugh is loud enough to wake the whole house.

***

Thanksgiving is a different affair than in years past. Gansey begs off the usual Gansey, Sr. and Company social obligations in favor of dining at Fox Way — “I’m going to forever be remembered as the worst child, aren’t I,” Blue caught him groaning to Helen over the phone — along with Ronan, Adam, Henry, and, of course, Blue, as well as the rest of her family.

There are too many of them to fit comfortably in the kitchen, but they make a valiant effort anyway, until at last they are forced to spill out into the living room, draping themselves across the old sofa and the armchairs. Calla hovers in the doorway for a moment, sipping her (highly alcoholic) drink and eyeing the invading teenagers suspiciously before wandering off once more.

They are loud and full and happy.

After, once the guests have left and the children have been put to bed and the aunts have retreated to their various nooks and crannies, Blue and Gansey find themselves alone on the couch, her feet in his lap. The TV murmurs quietly in the background.

Gansey puts a hand on her ankle — _skin to skin to skin_ — and says, very softly, “Blue.”

She looks at him, and waits.

They have not had much time alone, since his resurrection, in between doing homework assignments and attending wakes and tying up loose ends and reveling in the sheer relief of being alive. She knows — they both know, really — that the circumstances surrounding Gansey’s death carry implications for their relationship, but neither of them have yet dared to broach the subject.

Now, though — now, they are alone together, warm together, content together. His hand is on her ankle, and it is grounding and maddening, all in the same breath. She wants more and she wants nothing else at all, and she cannot decide which desire is stronger.

He says, again, “Blue. You know I love you, don’t you?”

“Gansey,” she says, catching his fingers in her own. “How could I not?”

He smiles, radiant and unfiltered, the kind of smile reserved just for her. She presses her other palm to his cheek in the gentlest of touches. “You know I love you too, don’t you?” she whispers.

His hand slips from hers, reaching up to tug at one of her barrettes. When her hair falls loose, he pushes it back, slow and lingering. “Jane,” he says, and his voice is aching. “ _Blue_. I think of it every minute.”

***

They’re all at Monmouth, the five of them, when someone brings up kissing. It’s difficult to remember who, as the conversation devolves into madness, but something about the tone of the discussion indicates that it was Henry: ever the romantic, ever the optimist.

It is early evening. Ronan, Adam, and Gansey are sprawled on the couch, gaming controls long abandoned in favor of pelting each other with popcorn. Henry is in the kitchen/bathroom/laundry room, making another batch to replace the ruined one. Blue is providing sound effects, hollering as Gansey takes a kernel to the eye.

“You’ve only kissed one person?” Henry asks, incredulous, as he returns with a second large bowl of buttery popcorn.

Ronan stops his brutal assault to fix Henry with a piercing glare; the strength of his gaze is muted only by the flush spreading up his neck. “So?” he replies, sounding more defensive than vicious.

“So nothing,” Henry says. “I suppose I’m just a little surprised. I would expect it from Wendybird over here, sure, but you —”

Blue looks up in righteous indignation. “What does that mean? I’ve kissed people.”

Adam says, “Hate to break it to you, but I don’t think your eighteen aunts count.” He and Ronan fistbump, gleeful. She cuffs them each on the back of the head.

“Not that its any of your business,” Blue says fiercely, “but Noah and I kissed. And Gansey and I —”

“Are going at it like rabbits,” Henry supplies. “Yes, we know.”

Blue glances over at Gansey, who is flushed and very pointedly looking at the ceiling, as though praying he might be excluded from the conversation. She says, in a quieter tone, “That’s not what I was going to say.”

There are apologies, and sounds of the conversation moving along, but her mind stays stuck on this idea: She and Gansey have not kissed since the day she killed him. Every time she thinks she might finally find the nerve to do it, there is something else standing in her way.

As time continues to pass, she finds herself wondering more and more if he even wants to. If he is afraid of the chance that he might die again. If he is her true love, but only because fate said so, and not because he chose to be.

This is the truth of it: In the aftermath of Gansey’s resurrection, in that dreary, dreamy time between dusk and dawn, Orla found time to pull Blue aside, pull three cards for her, and declare her curse-free in a tone loud enough to reach every corner of the living room.

It is, therefore, a possibility. They have not discussed it, though, because this thing between them still feels so fragile and new, like spun glass. Blue does not want it to break.

Blue does not want to break it.

They are quiet as he drives her home. There is conversation, but it is trivial, and she finds herself unable to concentrate on it. At the curb of 300 Fox Way, Gansey puts the Camaro in park, undoes his seatbelt, and turns to face her, the rims of his wireframes glinting in the distant glow of the streetlights. “What’s the matter?” he asks, earnest to his very core.

She could gloss over the matter. Put it in a box, tuck it away in the furthest corner of her mind, resolve to think of it no more. But she is Blue Sargent: superhero, desperado, mirror, girl. And more than anything, she wants to be brave. She wants to be honest.

She has grown so tired of secrets, these past few months. How could she bear to keep any more?

“We haven’t kissed,” she says to her hands. “Not since — Well.” There is silence for a long while, and when she looks up, she finds him looking at her, eyes conflicted. “I’m sorry,” she says on instinct. “I shouldn’t have —”

“Blue,” he says, and she quiets. “Can I take you somewhere?”

They drive for a long while, along a road she could never forget, drifting upwards into the mountains and towards the stars. When he parks the car once more, Henrietta is just a sea of yellow stars below them, paling in comparison to the galaxies above them.

She gets out of the car because she does not know what else to do, and for a moment, they stand there in silence. Blue settles herself on the hood of the car, forcing herself to be content to wait. She picks at the lacy hem of her skirt, and wonders what she’s done.

Finally, Gansey comes to her. He presses his hands against the car to either side of her, leaning down until they are eye to eye. “I’m sorry,” he says, and she raises her eyebrows in silent question. “For making you wait,” he explains. “For making you ever doubt —” He lifts one hand to brush his thumb across his lower lip, the thought left incomplete.

“For not asking you what you wanted,” he finishes, “because I was afraid.”

It is such a raw admission, so unguarded, that it tears at something within her, leaves her aching and breathless. She cradles his face in her hands, presses her forehead to his, and says, shakily, “It’s okay. Really, it is.”

There is a shift, small and hardly worth mentioning, and then his lips are pressed to hers, clumsy with want and nerves and a distinct lack of practice. It is, she thinks, the loveliest thing she’s ever experienced.

He does not die.

His heart does not give out.

Instead, they are two teenagers, breathlessly in love in the middle of nowhere, kissing and kissing and kissing, until their lips are swollen and they are laughing from the sheer magnitude of it all. “Gansey,” she says.

“Blue?”

Her eyes drift open, heavy with euphoria and sleep. “Take me home?”

“Lady Blue,” he says, fanciful and magical and ridiculous and alive, “it would be my pleasure.”

**Author's Note:**

> not sure how i feel about this, but i thought i'd post it anyway because it's been a while. thank u very much for reading. pls come cry with me on tumblr, where u can find me as [pairrish](www.pairrish.tumblr.com). comments are always welcome and appreciated :)


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